MGT5313 Chap.4 Personality and Diversity in the Workplace
Personality and Diversity in the Workplace
A model that is also an evidence map
This week pairs an in class personality inventory exercise with diversity as a property of an organization, and a four layer model supplies the join. Personality sits at the centre. Around it are internal dimensions, described as characteristics people are born with and cannot change, including age and race, gender and sexual orientation, and physical ability.
Around those are external dimensions such as money, geography, education, marital status and religion. Outermost are organizational dimensions: job function, work location, seniority and management position. Read outward from the middle and the model is a statement about what is knowable. The centre is reachable only by asking the person, and the outer rings are what a workforce report can count.
Almost every weak diversity argument is a claim about the centre supported by data from the outer rings.
What the published audit reports
The reading for this week is a mixed methods diversity audit of one large coffee retailer, combining the company's published workforce data with direct observation at two stores in one United States county in early 2024. Its reported figures are worth knowing exactly.
The United States workforce is given as 71.4 per cent female and 28.6 per cent male.
The reported racial composition of United States partners is 48.1 per cent white, 31.7 per cent Hispanic or Latino, 8.1 per cent Black, 5.9 per cent Asian, 4.9 per cent two or more races, 0.6 per cent American Indian or Alaskan Native and 0.5 per cent Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, which totals 99.8 rather than 100. The firm is reported as stating that it has achieved full pay equity by gender and race for United States employees since 2018. A widely cited consultancy finding is quoted, that firms in the top quartile on racial and ethnic diversity were 35 per cent likelier to return above the median for their own national industry, which is a statement about likelihood and is routinely misquoted as a promised performance gain.
Two theories, four pillars, one admitted gap
The audit rests on systems theory, which treats an organization as a set of interdependent pieces each affecting the whole and therefore asks whether diversity work is integrated with everything else, and on social identity theory, which sets out how people sort themselves, and everyone else, into social groups and directs attention to in group bias and out group favouritism.
An inclusive workplace model supplies four pillars: leadership commitment, fair policies, employee interaction and engagement, and continual learning. The audit then does something unusually instructive. In its results it states that diversity data on the management ranks was not acquired, and in its limitations it repeats that it did not investigate the diversity make up of managers and leaders.
Its conclusion nonetheless calls for more minority representation in leadership positions. That is the shape of the most common failure in applied organizational research: a recommendation that outruns its data by exactly one step, in the direction everybody in the room already believes.
Reading a workforce statistic well
Four questions settle most of it.
Who counted, since in this reading every quantitative claim about the firm traces to the firm's own published reporting. Counted when, since one share is dated only as of the first of October with the year appearing elsewhere. Counted where, since the demographic data is nationwide while the observation is two stores in one county and the conclusions move between the two.
And counted as what, since the consultancy finding is about likelihood rather than magnitude.
The reading also prints an industry comparison column whose figures are round where the company's are precise, and attributes the whole comparison to the company's own workforce report, so a comparison in which one firm supplies both columns is weaker than it looks.
From audit to recommendation
The reading closes with layered proposals: immediate training and focused recruitment, resource groups for underrepresented employees and regular review of indicators; longer term leadership development, scholarships with internships and supplier diversity; and forward steps including a dedicated task force and targets written to be specific, measurable, realistic, relevant and time bound.
One proposal belongs to this course in particular, which is localising diversity programmes to each country's social and cultural standards. It runs straight into the tension set up by the culture material, where the guidance was to build values unique and separate from identifiable country norms.
Producing a rule that decides which part of a programme is the value and which part is its local expression is a complete piece of analysis for one firm.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Four layers of diversity, with personality at the centre
- 02
What an audit can count and what only a person can report
- 03
The published workforce composition, and the residual it leaves
- 04
Systems theory and social identity theory as the audit's foundation
- 05
Four pillars of the inclusive workplace model
- 06
The conclusion the audit's own data does not reach
- 07
Four questions to put to any workforce statistic
- 08
Localising a programme against building values above local norms
Repair a claim the evidence does not reach
- 3State what the audit did and did not collect.
- 3Separate the evidenced part of the claim from the proposed part.
- 2Write the repaired sentence.
Key terms
- Internal Dimensions
- The layer of diversity covering characteristics the model describes as present from birth and unchangeable, including age and race, gender and sexual orientation, and physical ability.
- External Dimensions
- The layer covering acquired characteristics such as income, geography, education, marital status and religion, which an employer may partly record.
- Social Identity Theory
- An account of how people sort themselves, and everyone else, into social groups, used in the audit to direct attention toward in group bias and out group favouritism.
- Convenience Sampling
- Selecting observations because they are accessible rather than because they represent the population. The audit names it as its own observational method.
Personality and Diversity in the Workplace FAQ
Why does the chapter spend so long criticising one reading?
Because appraising evidence is one of the three published learning outcomes for this course, which asks you to conduct research and propose recommendations, and because this particular reading fails in an unusually teachable way. It is a published, peer reviewed article whose conclusion reaches past the data it collected, and noticing that is a transferable skill worth more than any fact the paper contains.
Is it fair to use company published diversity data at all?
Yes, provided the attribution travels with the number. Self published workforce data is often the only data that exists, and the course material treats company reporting as legitimate evidence about what the company states. The discipline is to write the source into the sentence, so that a reader knows who would be wrong if the figure turned out to be false.
How does the personality exercise connect to the rest of the week?
It is the only point in the course where you meet the innermost layer of the model directly. An inventory returns a description of one person, which is the level the attitudes and values machinery operates at, while the audit material operates three layers out.
The examinable skill is holding both in view, since an organization is managed through the outer layers and the behaviour people actually experience is produced at the centre.
Assessment move
Take any workforce statistic your project organization publishes and run the four questions over it in writing: who counted, when, where and as what. Doing this once teaches you more about handling evidence than reading a further case, and the resulting paragraph usually goes straight into the analysis section of the presentation.
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